1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to Web site traffic measurement.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generalized media has always included an advertising component aimed at defraying the cost of the media content itself. For instance, in the context of print media, magazine and newspaper advertisements provide a subsidy which in many cases counter-balances the cost of producing the textual content. By comparison, television media can base almost the entirety of its revenue upon the pre-sale of commercial advertisement slots. So much has the commercial advertising component become an element of television media, the content of commercial advertisements themselves often serve as the subject matter of television programs.
To gauge the effectiveness of a commercial advertisement in print media, oftentimes advertisers survey their customers to identify which customers first learned of a particular company or product through print advertisements. Similarly, in television media, advertisers can survey their respective customers to identify which customers first learned of a particular company or product through television commercial advertisements. Based upon the success rate of generating leads through commercial advertisements, media organizations such as television networks and print publishers can determine a fair pricing scheme for particularly timed or placed commercial advertisements.
Still, notwithstanding the actual number of leads or sales generated by a specific advertising campaign, the majority component of a pricing scheme can be directly related to the number of viewers of a television program, or the number of subscribers to a magazine or newspaper. To determine the size of an advertiser's audience in a specific magazine or newspaper, an advertiser need only consult the “circulation” of a specific magazine. More precisely, one can quantify the number of end-viewers of magazine or newspaper by comparing the number of print copies produced to the number of print copies returned to the publisher. The net result not only can include subscribers to the print copies, but also newsstand and bookstore sales, and the like.
Whereas the determination of an audience size in the context of print media can be a straightforward analysis, the analysis can be less precise in the context of television media. That is to say, television networks to date cannot identify every television tuned to a particular program at a particular time. Moreover, television networks cannot determine the number of people viewing a program through a television at a given time. Rather, the quantification of a viewing audience in television media largely is based upon limited survey samples and classic statistical models. As a result, an entire cottage industry of television program ranking has come to formation, mostly notably known through the pre-eminent ranking authority, the Nielson ratings.
Given the advent of the Internet, a new medium of commercial advertising has emerged having the potential to reach many millions more viewers than would otherwise be possible within the scope of print and television media. Mostly through the World Wide Web, commercial advertisements can be distributed to millions of on-line individuals asynchronously over a geographically dispersed area which literally encompasses the entire globe. Examples of such commercial advertisements include entire Web sites, Web site banner advertisements, strategically placed advertisements within a Web site, pop-up advertisements, etc. Still, pricing the distribution of commercial advertisements within the World Wide Web can be inexact when compared to pricing in the print media context. Moreover, the effectiveness of a marketing campaign centrally focused about a Web site can be deceptively difficult to quantify.
To facilitate the quantification of the effectiveness of a Web site, many have developed analysis tools designed to measure the number of persons (“surfers”) who have viewed portions of or an entire Web site. Most typically, conventional Web site monitoring tools perform a traffic analysis process in two parts: one dynamically and one statically. In particular, conventional Web site monitoring tools generate a log of Web site interactions dynamically as surfers view individual Web pages in a Web site. Web site logs typically include both success or failure data associated with the outcome of a request to access a Web page, and Internet protocol (IP) addressing data associated with the surfer and the requested resource with the Web page, including the Web page itself. Subsequently, a data reduction process can statically parse the log to identify trends, such as number of “hits”, number of pages downloaded within a particular period of time, etc.
Despite the sophistication of analytical techniques which have been applied to Web server logs, conventional analytical techniques have proven deficient in several regards. First, log file analysis can be ineffective when undertaken by the layperson. Moreover, log file analysis heretofore has not been automated so as to produce a subjective analysis of log file data without requiring human intervention. Finally, log file analysis cannot alone be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a Web site. Rather, conventional analytical techniques have proven effective only to the extent that these conventional techniques relate to a top-down approach based upon the performance of analyzed Web sites in the aggregate. Conventional techniques wholly ignore analytical metrics which might relate to the viewing of a Web site by an individual surfer. Thus, conventional techniques are misconfigured in this regard and are not able to quantify the “quality” of a Web site or visits to the Web site.